Minnesota, like a great many other states, participated in our great national mail-in voting experiment during last fall’s elections. And like a great many other states – either through Democrat lawsuit or Democrat rule-making – it eliminated meaningful ballot security. In Minnesota’s case, this meant removing both voter identification and signature witnessing for first-time mail-in voters. Combined with our country’s notoriously sloppy voter rolls, the net result was a system where it was virtually impossible to be sure that the ballot being returned was actually voted by the person who allegedly signed it.

While the presidential race wasn’t particularly close, a number of state legislative races were decided by extremely close margins, enough races to potentially have shifted the balance of power in the state House of Representatives. But the forensic work required to track down potentially fraudulent votes is enormous, certainly impossible between election day and the vote’s certification. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever know the total number of ballots fraudulently cast, and now those voters are part of the mail-in system.

In order to get things back under control, a Republican state senator has proposed that the state issue a specific photo ID to be used for voting. The ID would be issued for free to those who can’t afford it. Such an ID would also help to keep the voting rolls cleaned up, since it would be tied specifically to voting, unlike a drivers license or a Social Security card.

The senator proposing the bill also notes that it would help restore some faith in the voting system. No doubt this is true, although it would be more true if the Democrats hadn’t fought tooth and nail to derail even legitimate inquiries into voting irregularities in last year’s elections.

All of this proved too much for Vermont’s secretary of state, Jim Condos, who tweeted out the following:

Apparently, requiring that voters prove that they are who they say they are does “little” but suppress their votes. Note also that Senator Newman doesn’t allege that there was fraud, only that many people believe there was. Without any sort of long-term follow-up, given the lax rules in Minnesota, it’s hard to blame them for being suspicious. But Condos does, of course.

It’s unclear exactly what Condos finds “not acceptable.” Is the assertion of fraud, which nobody has made? Is it the “suppression” of eligible voters, which would in no way happen under the proposed law? It’s hard to tell.

But then, what business does the Vermont secretary of state have expounding on proposed election law in Minnesota. One of the most effective complaints about the last-minute Texas election lawsuit was that it would violate federalism. Indeed, one of the effective arguments against the so-called National Popular Vote interstate compact is that electors in, say, Colorado, would find themselves bound by the results of rules their state had no hand in making.

Instead, we see the fruits of the Democrats’ Secretary of State project, where those in charge of administering our elections and ensuring their integrity use the system to undermine that integrity, and then complain that people have no confidence in the system.

Jason Crow has just begun his second term representing Colorado’s 6th Congressional district. In response to last week’s riot at the US Capitol building, he has been tweeting frequently, in disgust at what happened (a disgust I share).

But he has also sought to turn the events to partisan political advantage, looking to turn the actions of a few hundred people on a single day into a general assault on the Republican Party.

He has, for instance, used his campaign account to accuse any and all Republicans who objected to the electoral vote counts from a handful of states of effectively taking the side of the rioters. This is, of course, rubbish from beginning to end, but it’s rubbish that much of the press seems to take seriously, if the reporters I follow on Twitter are representative of their caste.

Having established that narrative, Crow used his campaign account to call for corporate PACs to defund any Republicans who objected to the vote:

And he has used his official House account to claim this:

That is, anyone who suggested that anyone might have used the gaping holes opened up in our electoral process – holes opened up by Democrats – to commit election fraud, is disqualified from complaining about the terms he and President-Elect Biden intent to impose on their version of “unity.”

If anyone should be disqualified from preaching about unity, it’s Crow, whose own version of “truth and accountability” applies to only one form of political violence.

At the end of May last year, BLM protesters did significant damage to the Colorado state capitol, breaking windows, spray painting, among other things, a hammer-and-sickle, and generally trashing the grounds.

The truck of Senate President Leroy Garcia suffered a smashed windshield, and legislators took a few days off from their covid-delayed session to get some security back in place.

Crow’s official press release is titled as a statement about the Denver protests, but it never mentions Denver at all, spending more time trashing President Trump for suggesting that National Guard troops might be needed to restore order.

Later that summer, a protest in Aurora over the police shooting from 2019 of Elijah McClain got out of hand. The protesters took over and started marching down I-225, one of the major routes to Denver International Airport. When a man driving a Jeep on the way to the airport unexpectedly found himself in the middle of this mess, he did the natural thing and floored it, trying to get the hell through the mob and out of danger as quickly as possible.

At that point, one of the protesters pulled a gun and started shooting at the Jeep, hitting two other protesters instead. Fortunately, nobody was killed, but he was eventually charged with attempted murder. The Jeep driver was not charged.

You wouldn’t know any of this from Crow’s official press release on the matter:

We are still learning exactly what happened on Saturday night, but what we do know is horrifying enough: a driver sped through a crowd of protesters causing chaos and harm, in yet another example of the violence that is inflicted on those fighting for justice and equality. 

He mentions the destruction at the Municipal Building as a “distraction,” but neither here nor in additional releases on the McClain shooting does he acknowledge that the Jeep driver was acting out of fear and common sense, or that one of the protesters pulled a gun and started shooting.

In another incident last year, protesters “visited” Aurora City Councilman Francoise Bergen at her home, and demonstrated on the street and sidewalk in front of her house. Crow had nothing to say about that, either.

The inescapable conclusion is that for Rep. Crow, all political violence is bad, but some political violence is more bad than others, especially when it comes to his team.

Yoram Hazony writes in his excellent book, God and Politics in Esther, that there are basically three types of subjects in a tyranny. One can oppose the tyrant. One can keep one’s head down and passively support the tyrant. Or one can actively and energetically support the tyrant in ways he finds useful. Only the last is likely to earn much support from the tyrant or advancement within the regime.

Rep. Crow is making a strong bid to be a subject of the third kind.

Watching 16 Days Of Glory and reliving the 1984 Olympic Summer Games.

I came home from work every evening that summer, and plopped down in front of the TV to watch the Games for about 4 hours straight, and then stayed up until 1:00 for the late coverage. After they ended, I went through Olympics withdrawal. And some of the wins, like Joan Benoit in the women’s marathon, and the men’s gymnastics team, are still emotional.

Aside from the things I had forgotten, there are things that I hadn’t noticed before. For instance, before Zola Budd and Mary Decker collided, there was a moment where Decker looked down and frowned, clearly worried that Budd was crowding her. You only see that in slow-mo.

The movie was, I believe, Bud Greenspan’s first for the Olympics.
The cinematography is, of course, first-rate, and David Perry’s dead-pan, emotionless narration lets the athletes tell their own stories.

Given that the USA USA USA dominated the Games, in part because of the Soviet boycott, it could have been mostly about the US team. And he certainly doesn’t short the home team. But he makes room for plenty of foreign victory stories as well.

The photo above is not from the movie. It is, of course, Carl Lewis in the Long Jump, one of four gold medals he won that year. It by Neil Leifer, one of the greatest sports photographers of all time.

In a normal year, today would have been the 3rd day of the National Western Stock Show.

Oh, you thought this censorship stuff wasn’t about you, because you weren’t about Trump.

A friend of mind posted the follow on Facebook, only to have the site apply a “fact-check” to it. Understand that “fact-checks” are more than just checking facts. When run by the AP and by FB, they amount to entering the debate on the leftist side.

The Tax Foundation – the source of the data for the graphic used by Fox News – is a thoroughly center-right think tank, devoted to tax policy at all levels of government. The “fact-check” isn’t a fact-check, since it admits the facts are correct. In fact, the “context” that is allegedly missing – that the rates posted are only for the top earners, is literally in the headline for the graphic.

I look forward to any post by the left-of-center Brookings, The Urban League, Urban Institute, or Bell Policy Center being similarly “fact-checked.”

More realistically, we should be waiting to see how long it is before the Tax Foundation is demonetized and then deplatformed altogether.

But consider this an object lesson in how even policy-based right-of-center discussion is forced into pariah status. By putting a “fact-check” on this, it forces someone who posts it to defend the Tax Foundation and their work, with the allegedly objective FB and AP having put their thumb on the scale. Conservatives must work even to have their analyses considered legitimate and within the bounds of informed discussion, never mind get a debate on the facts. Left-of-center posts, no matter how far to the left, are granted immediate legitimacy.

With some frequency, I’ll be posting about books that I’m reading, will read, have read, or look forward to reading when I get the chance. I will try to post a link to those books, in the event that you’re interested in reading them, too.

In the past, that would have meant a link to Amazon, but no longer. I would link to ABE Books, but they have been bought by Amazon, so I will link to eBay instead. The eBay preview isn’t the sexiest, so I may also have to add a copy of the cover just for aesthetics.

Obviously, if you’d prefer to order from Amazon, the choice is yours. You can search on the author and title and probably find the book pretty easily. But I won’t be linking to them directly.

It’s a sad moment, another tiny step in the direction of a Red America and a Blue America. But after Amazon’s assist in crushing smaller businesses during the Covid shutdowns and the riots of 2020, and now their discontinuing of inconvenient apps, it’s one that I prefer to take.

I finally finished Daniel Boorstin’s The Americans: The Colonial Experience. It’s 372 pages long, divided up into bite-sized chapters of 5-10 pages each. For all that, it needs careful reading, and there’s something worth flagging in every chapter.

For instance, the press labored under government restrictions on this side of the Atlantic much longer than it did in Britain. Partially, this was because chronic shortages of paper, ink, and typeface made a successful press harder to run. But it’s also because the colonial governments passed press licensing laws here, and then kept them in force after similar laws in England had lapsed in the 1690s.

For instance, on page 329:

Authorities were still impressed by the great power for irresponsible attack which a press could put into any man’s hands. The European governing classes would no more have thought of leaving the manufacture of explosive printed matter unregulated than they would have permitted the unlicensed manufacture of gunpowder or the raising of private armies. In America control was exercised, sometimes in one way, sometimes in another, and the need to censor varied with the flow of events. But one fact is clear: the traditional European idea of monopolizing the press to cement the social order was successfully transplanted to American shores.”

We tend to think of our liberties as having been ancient, inherited from England, and being encroached upon by the Crown. But in at least this instance, freedom of the press was included in the First Amendment not from inheritance, but from the experience of not having had it.

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Say, “our democracy,” and it shall follow as the night the day that a libertarian will pedantically correct you, “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”  This is usually said hearkening back to the Founders, and of course it’s technically correct.  We are, or at least were designed to be, a representative republic and not a direct Athenian democracy.

I can state with some confidence that the number of people it’s persuaded is in the low single-digits.  Neither those being corrected nor those listening in are likely to second-guess their opinions on whatever subject is at hand, and there’s a good reason for that: our elections are democratic, we frequently have ballot measures that are decided by majority democratic vote, and people use the word “democracy” in common parlance all the time without thinking, “What Would Pericles Do?”

Most of the time, it’s both annoying and irrelevant.

A recent Washington Post oped decried the practice of “gunsplaining,” or pointing out that gun control activists often don’t know very much about the items they’re trying to regulate or ban.  The author argued that the sole purpose of correcting factual mistakes is to bully gun-control advocates into silence.  In my experience, bringing up the fact that there’s no such thing as a “full semi-automatic mode,” or noting with some derision that a Congressman, who’s actually empowered to make laws on this subject, describes a non-existent, “shoulder thing that goes up,” serves a different purpose.

Most of the gun-control activists and legislators in this country are on the left, which has spent the last century or so quietly and not-so-quietly shifting control over our lives to a bureaucracy of experts.  We are expected not merely to defer but to actually give thanks for this growing rule-by-enlightened-bureaucrat.  But when the subject turns to firearms, these very same people turn ignorance into a virtue.  “Gunsplaining”, in its best form, is used to make sure that we’re all talking about the same thing, as with any technical subject, and to make sure that people who want to impose new laws or regulations don’t make them overly-broad.  It’s not contemptuous; it pays the other party the respect of assuming that they’re acting in good faith.

To shout, “We’re a Republic, not a democracy!” in the middle of a gun control discussion doesn’t do any of that, because it’s not really relevant to the subject at hand.

There are plenty of cases where it does matter.  If the discussion is about eliminating the Electoral College in favor of a mythical National Popular Vote, or Colorado’s recent Amendment 71, changin

g the way that Constitutional amendments are adopted, govsplaining is entirely appropriate.  Like gunsplaining, it assumes that the other side is discussing the issue in good faith, may simply not recognize the difference between the two or the difference it makes, and tries to reach some understanding of terms that matter.  Govsplaining should be confined to those instances, but usually isn’t.

Contrary to popular opinion, this confusion is not a recent development, nor does it represent a catastrophic failure of our educational system, although there are plenty of those.  Allow a lengthy quotation from Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty  towards the end (pp. 717-18), where he’s discussing the changes between 1789 and 1815 in our early Republic:

If indeed the Americans had become one homogeneous people and the people as a single estate were all there was, then many Americans now became much more willing than they had been in 1789 to label their government a “democracy.”  At the time of the Revolution, “democracy” had been a pejorative term that conservative leveled at those who wanted to give too much power to the people; indeed Federalists identified democracy with mobocracy, or as Gouverneur Morris said, “no government at all…”

But increasingly in the years following the Revolution the Republicans and other popular groups, especially in the North, began turning the once derogatory terms “democracy” and “democrat” into emblems of pride.  Even in the early 1790s some contended that “the words Republican and Democratic are synonymous” and claimed that anyone who “is not a Democrat is an aristocrat or a monocrat.”  …soon many of the Northern Republicans began labeling their party the Democratic-Republican party.  Early in the first decade of the nineteenth century even neutral observers were casually referring to the Republicans as the “Dems” or the “Democrats.”

With these Democrats regarding themselves as the nation, it was not long before people began to challenge the traditional culture’s aversion to the term “democracy.”  “The government adopted here is a DEMOCRACY,” boasted the populist Baptist Elias Smith (pictured) in 1809.  “It is well for us to understand this word, so much ridiculed by the international enemies of our beloved country.  The word DEMOCRACY is formed of two Greek words, one signifies the people, and the other the government which is in the people…. My Friends, let us never be ashamed of DEMOCRACY!”

We all know the difference between a representative republic and a direct democracy.  The Americans of 1790-1810 knew it, too.  I suspect when pressed, most Americans even now understand the difference.  It’s important not to let corruption of the language degrade our understanding of institutions, and eventually our institutions themselves.  But it’s most important when it’ll do some actual good.